' latest episode, "The Long Night." It also includes discussion around key plot points from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. For more on Game of Thrones, be sure to read our Season 8, episode 3 review.

After seven seasons and two episodes of build up, the Army of the Living finally had its last stand against the Army of the Dead, and in the course of 80 minutes (and one "long night"), the Night King, at long last, was finally defeated.

There are three more episodes to go in Game of Thrones' eighth and final season, and if the preview for episode 4 is any indication, the battle against Cersei Lannister for the Iron Throne (what Daenerys Targaryen calls the "last war") will be the key conflict resolved in this last stretch before the end. Sure, there's every opportunity for Game of Thrones to throw in one last surprise about the White Walkers before this whole thing comes to a close -- is Bran actually the Night King? I sure hope not! -- but if there's one thing this season has done so far as we pass its midpoint, it's streamline its story to a definitive, if almost too tidy plot resolution.

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So why is that so disappointing? Because it's clear that Game of Thrones the show has diverged in many ways from the complex, complicated, and oftentimes convoluted story on which it's based, even if this version is supposedly heading toward a roughly similar end. But this shouldn't be surprising, even if it was surprising that The Night King was ousted in one single episode without a single Stark dying. In fact, the trajectory of HBO's hit series has been heading in this direction for some time now.

It's easy to forget that there was a time before Game of Thrones seasons cost as much as blockbuster movies and dragon fought dragon in the sky, but Season 1 wasn't popular because it was a story of a dragon queen and her quest to kill a mythical, chilly threat; it became such appointment television because it was a medieval political drama -- The Sopranos with British accents instead of Jersey -- that just happened to be set in a world where magic used to exist. It helped that it had one truly shocking twist after another (RIP Ned Stark, Robb Stark, Oberyn Martell, and even Jon Snow) that subverted genre tropes, TV tropes, and general storytelling tropes as we knew them.

Pretty much all of that came from George R.R. Martin's source material, and the early seasons of the TV show captured that compelling complexity with some Hollywood flourishes. At the root of that adaptation was a passion for Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire world and a respect for the mystery that made his writing so interesting. As Martin told Rolling Stone in a 2014 interview, he set out to write a sprawling series not constrained by the same limitations of a TV series, so by all rights, it makes sense that the HBO show would have to truncate some of his storytelling.

The Game of Thrones That Never Was

Still, those early seasons teased the layers to A Song of Ice and Fire that seemed like they were fragments of a larger story worth grasping onto. Part of what made and continues to make Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire book series so compelling is the layers and layers of stories he is telling. Sure, you can take the plot at face value, but dig a little deeper, and you realize, holy s**t, it was Jeyne Westerling's mother who orchestrated the Red Wedding by betraying her son-in-law to Tywin Lannister and oh my god Wyman Manderly was gobbling up those pies because they were loaded to the brim with dead Freys and heck yes Mance Rayder is actually alive and at Winterfell pretending to be a bard.

It's what has led to fans speculating and theorizing and over-analyzing every line of Martin's works for years, and putting a lot of credibility into offhand lines of dialogue (many of which made their way to the TV show as well) about the Prince Who Was Promised, Azor Ahai, and the Isle of Faces. And when some of the most popular theories started paying off in HBO's Game of Thrones series as the show passed the published books -- Jon really was Rhaegar and Lyanna's child, the Gravedigger really was Sandor Clegane in a post-Hound life, and Coldhands really was Benjen Stark -- it was exciting to see that all of that speculation was paying off as fact, even if the twists weren't written by Martin himself.

Surely that means all the other things fans were invested in -- the valonqar, Azor Ahai and, heck, even the direwolves -- have a key role to play, right? Maybe in the books, but at this point, it's clear they'll almost certainly mean next to nothing in the show -- sorry, Ghost!

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Had Martin finished publishing his novels ahead of HBO's adaptation, things might have been different, but you can feel the show's pacing shift after Season 5 when the TV series finally reached and passed its source material. GRRM has said a continued, faithful adaptation of his yet-unpublished final two novels would have resulted in five more seasons' worth of content. Considering we've already waited eight years for the next book to come out, the HBO show had no choice but to forge its own path and tell its own story, but there's no denying that it has become a simpler, more straightforward, and definitely more trope-ridden show in the past three seasons. Ironically, that more simplified storytelling is contrary to the type of tale Martin is even trying to tell.

Case in point: the Night King, who showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have described as a literal embodiment of death, is an invention of the show and doesn't exist in this form (that we know of) in A Song of Ice and Fire. (There's a historical figure known as the Night's King in ASoIaF, but he seems largely just that: a historical figure who won't have much bearing on the current story in the books.) Much of the intricate plotting and theory-riddled references to the books in the earlier seasons have slipped away as Game of Thrones has been left to its own storytelling devices, and that change has opened the door for many of the high fantasy storytelling tropes Martin was striving to avoid when comparing himself to the granddaddy of all high fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

"The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that’s become the template. I’m not sure that it’s a good template, though," Martin told Rolling Stone back in 2014. "The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that."

Game of Thrones: All the White Walker Spirals So Far

That's exactly what the Battle for Winterfell in "The Long Night" was, though. After spending arguably too many brain cells discussing and dissecting why I (and many others) have been so disappointed by the Night King payoff, I think it feels too simple when looking at Martin's story as a whole. The Night King, the White Walkers, and the army of wights simply being destroyed by one stab of Arya's Valyrian steel dagger is an even more simple version of Frodo throwing the ring into Mount Doom; at least that climax didn't make all the orcs crumble into dust, instead leaving them alive for the good guys to deal with after the final battle.

But I have to wrestle with a simple fact: my disappointment stems not from the show itself, but because I have conflated what Martin is out to accomplish with what this TV adaptation is trying to do, and they're not the same. It's my own high expectations based on my love of the source material that are working against me. The show is its own creation now, no longer an adaptation but an evolution into its own type of high fantasy story. It's just one that's lost the complexity, subversiveness, and uncertainty of what made Martin's stories initially so compelling to me.

Maybe Martin's Song of Ice and Fire will boil down to the same simple battle of good versus evil that the show has been exploring in Season 8, but I don't think so. I maintain hope that, if the books ever are finished, those intricate story beats will play out with a purpose, and not fizzle out to nothing. To that end, I retain hope that Game of Thrones' show conclusion, which was always promised to be bittersweet, will stay true to another tenet of Martin's writing (especially as it relates to Tolkien): this story isn't going to have a simple, happy ending.

Game of Thrones: Which Dead TV Characters are Still Alive in Winds of Winter?

Martin described A Song of Ice and Fire as his "answer to Tolkien," specifically challenging the ending where Aragorn becoming king after Sauron's defeat meant peace, end of story. "Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple," said Martin in 2014. "Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs?"

Though Martin might not have liked the straightforwardness of Tolkien's conclusion to Aragorn's story, he did cite inspiration from the Scouring of the Shire section of the story, which saw Frodo's return to the Shire mired by unexpected destruction which proves that war taints everything, and you can never really return to the way things were before it began. My hope is that A Song of Ice and Fire has the same incredibly melancholy, messy ending, which seems like the only ending that a story like this could realistically have.

"In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with," Martin continued. "Just being a good guy was not the answer. ... There are some people who read and want to believe in a world where the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and at the end they live happily ever after. That’s not the kind of fiction that I write. Tolkien was not that. The scouring of the Shire proved that. Frodo’s sadness – that was a bittersweet ending, which to my mind was far more powerful than the ending of Star Wars, where all the happy Ewoks are jumping around, and the ghosts of all the dead people appear, waving happily."

Here's hoping Game of Thrones, for all its seeming focus on just getting to the ending, doesn't contradict that basic premise of Martin's work in its final three episodes.

For more on Game of Thrones, check out the preview for Season 8, episode 4 below:

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Terri Schwartz is Editor-in-Chief of Entertainment at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.

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